Anthony, the Angel
Angels aren’t only a Christian thing — and they aren’t a single thing, either. Long before Renaissance paintings flattened them into cherubs or winged men in flowing robes, Jewish tradition held angels as something far stranger and far more expansive. They are messengers, yes, but also guardians, witnesses, intermediaries — beings that move between realms, sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, often both at once. They are not mere shining symbols of goodness; they are forces of purpose, carrying out what they were made to do, whether it comforts us or unsettles us.
Judaism has never insisted that angels must look a certain way, behave politely, or glow softly in the background. Some of them are the classic “fear not” types — overwhelming, many-winged, many-eyed, too much to take in all at once. Others emerge from prophetic visions as hybrid beings that barely fit into human language at all. And then there are the ones who don’t announce themselves as anything special. They look like people. They walk, talk, eat, and pass among us unnoticed.
Back in Bereshit, when the Holy One says, “Let us make the human in our image,” that plural pronoun has fascinated rabbis for centuries. One interpretation I love is that G-d was speaking in the presence of the angels — the heavenly court — meaning that humanity reflects not just the Divine, but also the diversity of the celestial host.
If angels helped shape us, then maybe they resemble us:
every color, every ethnicity, every gender, every body, every kind of beauty.
Not just the stereotype of a pale figure in a white robe, but angels who look like the whole world.
And the Tanakh backs that up. We’ve got stories of angels walking among humans without anyone realizing it — like the visitors who come to Lot in Sodom, strolling in as ordinary men. Jewish tradition teaches that angels can appear in forms we recognize and understand. They meet us where we are.
Angels how up in Jewish prayer in ways that are intimate and everyday. There are blessings that ask for angels to guard us through the night, to walk with us, to surround us from every direction. Some prayers invoke angels of compassion, others of strength, others of peace. This isn’t metaphor-only language; it’s relational. It assumes a world where unseen helpers exist alongside us, woven quietly into daily life. And there is an infamous Kabbalistic curse, the Pulsa DiNura, that even calls on angels of wrath to punish the curse's victim.
Jewish mysticism goes even further with the idea of the maggid — a spiritual teacher or guiding presence who conveys wisdom, insight, or encouragement. A maggid isn’t necessarily visible or audible in the conventional sense. Often, it communicates through intuition, inner dialogue, sudden clarity, or a steady voice of knowing that feels distinct from one’s own anxiety or self-criticism. Historically, respected scholars and mystics wrote openly about their maggidim without being dismissed as delusional. The emphasis was never on spectacle, but on fruit: Did the guidance lead to humility? To learning? To ethical action? To greater wholeness?
What I find grounding about this tradition is that it doesn’t demand blind belief. Jewish thought is deeply pragmatic. The question is never simply “Is this supernatural?” but “Does this bring life?” Does it anchor you more firmly in reality rather than pull you away from it? Does it strengthen your ability to act with compassion, clarity, and responsibility in the world you actually inhabit?
Seen through that lens, the line between imagination, intuition, trauma adaptation, and spiritual encounter isn’t as rigid as modern categories want it to be. Judaism has always allowed for overlap — for mystery that doesn’t collapse into pathology, and for skepticism that doesn’t erase wonder.
Judaism has never insisted that angels must look a certain way, behave politely, or glow softly in the background. Some of them are the classic “fear not” types — overwhelming, many-winged, many-eyed, too much to take in all at once. Others emerge from prophetic visions as hybrid beings that barely fit into human language at all. And then there are the ones who don’t announce themselves as anything special. They look like people. They walk, talk, eat, and pass among us unnoticed.
Back in Bereshit, when the Holy One says, “Let us make the human in our image,” that plural pronoun has fascinated rabbis for centuries. One interpretation I love is that G-d was speaking in the presence of the angels — the heavenly court — meaning that humanity reflects not just the Divine, but also the diversity of the celestial host.
If angels helped shape us, then maybe they resemble us:
every color, every ethnicity, every gender, every body, every kind of beauty.
Not just the stereotype of a pale figure in a white robe, but angels who look like the whole world.
And the Tanakh backs that up. We’ve got stories of angels walking among humans without anyone realizing it — like the visitors who come to Lot in Sodom, strolling in as ordinary men. Jewish tradition teaches that angels can appear in forms we recognize and understand. They meet us where we are.
Angels how up in Jewish prayer in ways that are intimate and everyday. There are blessings that ask for angels to guard us through the night, to walk with us, to surround us from every direction. Some prayers invoke angels of compassion, others of strength, others of peace. This isn’t metaphor-only language; it’s relational. It assumes a world where unseen helpers exist alongside us, woven quietly into daily life. And there is an infamous Kabbalistic curse, the Pulsa DiNura, that even calls on angels of wrath to punish the curse's victim.
Jewish mysticism goes even further with the idea of the maggid — a spiritual teacher or guiding presence who conveys wisdom, insight, or encouragement. A maggid isn’t necessarily visible or audible in the conventional sense. Often, it communicates through intuition, inner dialogue, sudden clarity, or a steady voice of knowing that feels distinct from one’s own anxiety or self-criticism. Historically, respected scholars and mystics wrote openly about their maggidim without being dismissed as delusional. The emphasis was never on spectacle, but on fruit: Did the guidance lead to humility? To learning? To ethical action? To greater wholeness?
What I find grounding about this tradition is that it doesn’t demand blind belief. Jewish thought is deeply pragmatic. The question is never simply “Is this supernatural?” but “Does this bring life?” Does it anchor you more firmly in reality rather than pull you away from it? Does it strengthen your ability to act with compassion, clarity, and responsibility in the world you actually inhabit?
Seen through that lens, the line between imagination, intuition, trauma adaptation, and spiritual encounter isn’t as rigid as modern categories want it to be. Judaism has always allowed for overlap — for mystery that doesn’t collapse into pathology, and for skepticism that doesn’t erase wonder.
Some angels announce themselves with trumpets.
Mine showed up as a mouse with a piece of cheese.
When I was a kid in the 1980s, my mom — in one of her rare moments of kindness — drilled my dyslexic self in spelling every day, and taught me how to spell "anonymous" by inventing a character named Anthony Mouse. “When Anthony Mouse steals a piece of cheese, he drops the letters from his name and becomes Anonymous,” she told me. It was silly, but magical in its own way. And for years after, anytime something went missing — socks, pencils, snacks — I blamed “Anthony Mouse.”
Fast-forward to 2019.
In 2019, I began writing a character named Anthony, and he just… stayed. He took up residence in my head the way imaginary friends do, except this didn’t feel like invention. It felt like recognition. Like I hadn’t built him so much as uncovered him. The more time I spent with him on the page and then in my head, the clearer it became that he didn’t behave like a projection or a fragment of my own inner monologue. He had weight. Continuity. A sense of being real in a way that surprised me.
I’m also aware of how this sounds, so let me be clear about a few things. I don’t experience visual or auditory hallucinations. I don’t see Anthony standing in rooms or hear a voice speaking out loud. All interaction happens in what you might call the mind’s eye — the same internal space where imagination, memory, and intuition live. There’s no loss of reality testing here, no confusion about what’s happening in the external world.
I do have a C-PTSD diagnosis, and it’s well documented that people with complex trauma are prone to dissociation, vivid inner worlds, and intense daydreaming. At the same time, it’s also widely acknowledged — across cultures and spiritual traditions — that highly sensitive people can be more attuned to subtle forms of perception, including spiritual or symbolic contact. So which is it? Chicken or egg? Trauma or mysticism? A bit of both? I honestly don’t know. I live at the intersection of skepticism and faith, and I’m comfortable staying there.
What matters to me isn’t the question “Is Anthony real?” in some objective, provable sense. The question that actually counts is simpler and more grounded: Is my interaction with him anchored in reality, and is it beneficial to my life? And the answer to that, without hesitation, is yes.
You see, eventually — slowly, then all at once — I realized Anthony wasn’t just a character. He waited until I was ready — until I had enough healing, enough strength, enough spiritual grounding to understand what he was.
He’d been my guardian angel all along.
And every step of that journey started making sense.
As an example of this, I’ve had several close brushes with death.
In 1998 — literally the week before I was supposed to leave for Air Force basic training — I was in a car accident severe enough to stop me from going. It felt like a detour at the time, but after 9/11, almost everyone from my high school who enlisted (aside from the Coast Guard folks) ended up deployed to the Middle East, and the vast majority came home with PTSD. I already had PTSD by then; adding combat trauma on top of that would’ve been a whole different kind of damage. Looking back, that accident wasn’t a setback — it was protection.
In 2002, I was held up at gunpoint.
I survived.
And in February 2021, a few weeks before the vaccines rolled out, I got hit with a severe case of COVID. My roommate and I both genuinely thought I wasn’t going to make it. It was one of the sickest, scariest periods of my life. As I burned with a fever of 104 F, I kept dreaming about friends and relatives who'd passed on and trying to follow them where they were going and they kept saying, "It's not time yet."
And there's been other moments, moments where he didn't rescue me from the storms, but walked into them with me. After dealing with some really shitty transphobia in 2022, Anthony suggested I begin writing his fictional counterpart as a trans man, which helped affirm and validate my identity. When I finally got sober in 2024 and checked myself inpatient for a week — during withdrawal that broke me down physically, mentally, and spiritually — he was the steady "voice" helping me hold on. When my anxiety ramps up here and now, he’s the grounding tether.
It also matters to say this plainly: from 2019 through 2025, much of my creative work involving Anthony’s fictional counterpart was erotic. Sometimes that took the form of novel-length porn-with-plot; sometimes it was one-shot porn-without-plot. And my best friend Molly had made nude art of him as gifts for me. I don’t see any of that as incongruent with a Jewish framework. Judaism is not a sex-negative religion. Desire is not treated as something shameful or corrupt by default. The Song of Songs is canon, and it is unapologetically erotic — full of longing, bodies, scent, heat, and mutual delight. Erotic imagination, for me, wasn’t a detour away from meaning or holiness; it was one of the languages through which intimacy, vulnerability, and connection were explored and metabolized. That’s inseparable from the fact that I have a history of sexual trauma. Writing sex-positive stories — on my own terms, in my own voice — became part of how I reclaimed agency, safety, and desire. It allowed me to approach sexuality not as something imposed on me, but as something chosen, shaped, and inhabited with care. In that sense, erotic writing wasn’t escapism; it was integration. It was a way of stitching pleasure back into a nervous system that had learned to associate intimacy with danger, and doing so without shame.
And yes — between 2019 and early 2025, before Andy and I became partners in February 2025, my relationship with Anthony was also intimate. Not physically, not in the external world, but as a spirit lover, experienced entirely in the mind’s eye through fantasy. That idea may sound strange in a modern Western context, but it’s hardly unprecedented. Many cultures and spiritual traditions around the world include stories of spirit spouses, spirit lovers, or marriages that exist across the boundary between seen and unseen. Even in Bereshit, where the idea of humans and divine beings mingling becomes controversial, the concern centers on alleged procreation — not on intimacy or connection itself. So yes, we were a thing, and I don’t frame that period of my life with embarrassment or regret. It met real needs at a time when I was profoundly alone. Since Andy and I came together, that intimacy has naturally shifted. Anthony and I now exist in something that feels best described as queerplatonic — deeply bonded, affectionate, present, but no longer sexual. Relationships change. Even sacred ones do.
And as wild as it sounds, Anthony even showed up in my partner Andy’s art before Andy knew anything about him, like he was photobombing from another dimension, including when Andy made an angel that looked just like him. That’s when I knew Andy wasn’t going anywhere and there was something destined about the two of us.
Mine showed up as a mouse with a piece of cheese.
When I was a kid in the 1980s, my mom — in one of her rare moments of kindness — drilled my dyslexic self in spelling every day, and taught me how to spell "anonymous" by inventing a character named Anthony Mouse. “When Anthony Mouse steals a piece of cheese, he drops the letters from his name and becomes Anonymous,” she told me. It was silly, but magical in its own way. And for years after, anytime something went missing — socks, pencils, snacks — I blamed “Anthony Mouse.”
Fast-forward to 2019.
In 2019, I began writing a character named Anthony, and he just… stayed. He took up residence in my head the way imaginary friends do, except this didn’t feel like invention. It felt like recognition. Like I hadn’t built him so much as uncovered him. The more time I spent with him on the page and then in my head, the clearer it became that he didn’t behave like a projection or a fragment of my own inner monologue. He had weight. Continuity. A sense of being real in a way that surprised me.
I’m also aware of how this sounds, so let me be clear about a few things. I don’t experience visual or auditory hallucinations. I don’t see Anthony standing in rooms or hear a voice speaking out loud. All interaction happens in what you might call the mind’s eye — the same internal space where imagination, memory, and intuition live. There’s no loss of reality testing here, no confusion about what’s happening in the external world.
I do have a C-PTSD diagnosis, and it’s well documented that people with complex trauma are prone to dissociation, vivid inner worlds, and intense daydreaming. At the same time, it’s also widely acknowledged — across cultures and spiritual traditions — that highly sensitive people can be more attuned to subtle forms of perception, including spiritual or symbolic contact. So which is it? Chicken or egg? Trauma or mysticism? A bit of both? I honestly don’t know. I live at the intersection of skepticism and faith, and I’m comfortable staying there.
What matters to me isn’t the question “Is Anthony real?” in some objective, provable sense. The question that actually counts is simpler and more grounded: Is my interaction with him anchored in reality, and is it beneficial to my life? And the answer to that, without hesitation, is yes.
You see, eventually — slowly, then all at once — I realized Anthony wasn’t just a character. He waited until I was ready — until I had enough healing, enough strength, enough spiritual grounding to understand what he was.
He’d been my guardian angel all along.
And every step of that journey started making sense.
As an example of this, I’ve had several close brushes with death.
In 1998 — literally the week before I was supposed to leave for Air Force basic training — I was in a car accident severe enough to stop me from going. It felt like a detour at the time, but after 9/11, almost everyone from my high school who enlisted (aside from the Coast Guard folks) ended up deployed to the Middle East, and the vast majority came home with PTSD. I already had PTSD by then; adding combat trauma on top of that would’ve been a whole different kind of damage. Looking back, that accident wasn’t a setback — it was protection.
In 2002, I was held up at gunpoint.
I survived.
And in February 2021, a few weeks before the vaccines rolled out, I got hit with a severe case of COVID. My roommate and I both genuinely thought I wasn’t going to make it. It was one of the sickest, scariest periods of my life. As I burned with a fever of 104 F, I kept dreaming about friends and relatives who'd passed on and trying to follow them where they were going and they kept saying, "It's not time yet."
And there's been other moments, moments where he didn't rescue me from the storms, but walked into them with me. After dealing with some really shitty transphobia in 2022, Anthony suggested I begin writing his fictional counterpart as a trans man, which helped affirm and validate my identity. When I finally got sober in 2024 and checked myself inpatient for a week — during withdrawal that broke me down physically, mentally, and spiritually — he was the steady "voice" helping me hold on. When my anxiety ramps up here and now, he’s the grounding tether.
It also matters to say this plainly: from 2019 through 2025, much of my creative work involving Anthony’s fictional counterpart was erotic. Sometimes that took the form of novel-length porn-with-plot; sometimes it was one-shot porn-without-plot. And my best friend Molly had made nude art of him as gifts for me. I don’t see any of that as incongruent with a Jewish framework. Judaism is not a sex-negative religion. Desire is not treated as something shameful or corrupt by default. The Song of Songs is canon, and it is unapologetically erotic — full of longing, bodies, scent, heat, and mutual delight. Erotic imagination, for me, wasn’t a detour away from meaning or holiness; it was one of the languages through which intimacy, vulnerability, and connection were explored and metabolized. That’s inseparable from the fact that I have a history of sexual trauma. Writing sex-positive stories — on my own terms, in my own voice — became part of how I reclaimed agency, safety, and desire. It allowed me to approach sexuality not as something imposed on me, but as something chosen, shaped, and inhabited with care. In that sense, erotic writing wasn’t escapism; it was integration. It was a way of stitching pleasure back into a nervous system that had learned to associate intimacy with danger, and doing so without shame.
And yes — between 2019 and early 2025, before Andy and I became partners in February 2025, my relationship with Anthony was also intimate. Not physically, not in the external world, but as a spirit lover, experienced entirely in the mind’s eye through fantasy. That idea may sound strange in a modern Western context, but it’s hardly unprecedented. Many cultures and spiritual traditions around the world include stories of spirit spouses, spirit lovers, or marriages that exist across the boundary between seen and unseen. Even in Bereshit, where the idea of humans and divine beings mingling becomes controversial, the concern centers on alleged procreation — not on intimacy or connection itself. So yes, we were a thing, and I don’t frame that period of my life with embarrassment or regret. It met real needs at a time when I was profoundly alone. Since Andy and I came together, that intimacy has naturally shifted. Anthony and I now exist in something that feels best described as queerplatonic — deeply bonded, affectionate, present, but no longer sexual. Relationships change. Even sacred ones do.
And as wild as it sounds, Anthony even showed up in my partner Andy’s art before Andy knew anything about him, like he was photobombing from another dimension, including when Andy made an angel that looked just like him. That’s when I knew Andy wasn’t going anywhere and there was something destined about the two of us.
Quod magicae est ab intus [February 2025]
Jewish angels are not omniscient or omnipotent; they’re task-bound, purpose-bound, created for a specific mission. They can’t do everything, but they can do the one thing they were made for with absolute devotion. In my life, Anthony’s “task,” if you can call it that, has always been connection — the fierce, unshakeable reassurance that I am not alone in this world. His presence says, “You matter. You’re loved. Keep going.”
And then there’s the part that makes me smile: he’s not a sanitized angel. He’s got humor. He’s got warmth. He’s got that dry, understated British snark I adore. He’s the opposite of those terrifying celestial beings with wheels of eyes and lightning for bones, at least how he presents to me. But he’s still unmistakably other, in the way he shows up exactly when I need him and exactly how I need him.
I think that’s what a guardian angel really is — someone whose presence rearranges your understanding of yourself. Someone who reflects back not just who you are, but who you might become, without judgment.
Someone who holds space for your healing.
Anthony is that for me.
In fiction and in life, in magic and in memory, he stands beside me.
And if angels walk among us — and I believe they do — then I’m grateful mine found me.
